One Bad Apple Spoils The Bunch

I’ve been struggling the past several months. What used to be a tingle of distaste for a brand has become a torrent of madness. Where once reason and uncertainty made me bite my tongue, familiarity has now bred contempt. I speak of course, of Apple.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll say here and now: I’ve never owned an Apple product. (I’ve also never employed a prostitute or smoked PCP, but I can still argue against their use.)

For the longest time, I avoided Apple products because the only things in that categorization were computers - and I knew how to use my PC quite well, thank you. Fast forward a decade and a half, Apple is the biggest sensation in tech. Even the pundits that despise Apple can’t keep their mouths shut about ‘em. (Myself included.)

Apple has graced us this month with the release of the iPad. For those of you not following the situation, the iPad is basically a giant iPod Touch:

• Boasting 9+ hours of battery life, the 1.5lb iPad is heavy enough that you won’t want to hold it for more than an hour at a time lest you change your workout regiment. (Or integrate it in.)
• With its “9.7-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit glossy widescreen Multi-Touch display” you’ll get to use your favorite content-consuming apps at double the size, but it’s ineffective “fingerprint-resistant oleophobic coating” will make it look like a CSI crime scene and leave you needing to carry a terry cloth with you everwhere.
• With it’s built-in speaker, microphone, bluetooth, and video codecs – you’ll be able to do all of your favorite multimedia consumption, except for video conferencing or taking pictures because it doesn’t currently have a camera.
• Being one of the only “large” mobile multi-touch devices on the market, it features one of the largest on-screen keyboards out there – but the extended typing they claim you can easily do on it is still so unwieldy they’ve simultaneously released a keyboard attachment.
• It also features the all-acclaimed Safari Mobile, supporting large chunks of HTML 5 and CSS 3, so it’s ready for the web of tomorrow - but without Flash support it’s useless for 90% of today’s internet.

Okay, so the hardware sucks. The browser sucks. Shouldn’t it be about the apps?

I’m a software developer, so I can appreciate “apps” - little nuggets of easy-to-maintain code and functionality that are sold individually, for cheap prices, to the masses - little nuggets of code that are small enough, I would be tempted to find a means to simultaneously develop for multiple app platforms easily, so that I can move on to the next app without hassle.

And you know what? Microsoft gets this. Google gets this. Apple hates it.

Fresh out of the pearly gates of Cupertino, the Apple iPhone OS 4 SDK license agreement says, amongst many things:

Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs
(e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

What this means, in layman’s terms, for any programmer or software shop that used to sneak apps across the Apple border by cross-compiling their Flash, Java, or C# into C/C++/Objective-C before deployment, they are simply out of luck.

My brain is simply without recourse in its search for a plausible explanation. The most I can figure is, Apple doesn’t want the slew of upcoming Windows Phone 7 apps to be translated and submitted to the Apple App store. (That is, they want developers to pick a side and stay on it.) Or they just really really really want to absolutely kill Flash. It’s no secret that Jobs hates Flash. The fact that his complaints against Adobe and Flash are retorted with the reality that Apple doesn’t have any decent high-performance APIs to code against, doesn’t seem to weaken his resolve.

Despite my nay-saying in the past, and my general bias towards the Microsoft development stack, I have been secretly enthused the last 4 or 5 weeks with the possibility of writing a .NET app that would run on Windows, Xbox, Zune, & Windows Phone 7 – and then using Mono to run it on Mac, iPhone, iPod, and iPad – all with 90% shared code – but Apple has eliminated that possibility. I am no longer tempted to take a bite out of the Apple development community.

This one’s got a worm in it.

Friday, April 09, 2010 3:44:00 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)      Comments [0]  winpho | computers | wp7 | iPad | iPhone | html5 | iPod | pure-rant | windows | xbox | apple | winmo | zune | silverlight | technology | xna | flash | microsoft | current events | dotnet